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Self-Esteem
Harness the Cheerleader Effect to Boost Self-Esteem
A simple psychological trick can make you look and feel better.
Posted January 15, 2020 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
Is the hype of New Year’s resolutions and self-improvement programmes making you question your self-worth? If you are tired of fad diets, juice cleanses, or detox programmes, why not try a different approach to improving both your looks and self-esteem this year? Harnessing the power of the “Cheerleader Effect” could be an alternative approach that delivers faster success.
What is the “Cheerleader Effect”?
The Cheerleader Effect describes a simple, yet powerful psychological phenomenon: Just as cheerleaders typically look better as part of a large team, people generally appear more attractive in groups than on their own. This means that the small act of surrounding yourself with other people – either friends or strangers – can improve the way others perceive you. Hence, instead of uploading single headshots to your dating profiles and social media pages, you’d do better by posing as part of larger groups. Standing beside your office colleagues, posing arm in arm with your yoga mates, taking a family shot at Christmas, or being caught on camera during a group demonstration may all do the trick.
The surprising phenomenon was investigated in a series of related experiments, for example comparing the effect across different group compositions. Results showed that the Cheerleader Effect was persistent across groups of four, nine, and 16 people, suggesting that the group-boost on attractiveness is surprisingly robust and that size doesn’t matter.
Why are people in groups more attractive?
Why do people look better surrounded by others than on their own? Initial guesses suggested that the social interaction shown in group photos increases a person’s attractiveness. Being able to relate to other people is a desirable skill, which also suggests openness, a friendly nature, and a certain degree of extraversion. The indirect signal of social skills in group shots could therefore bias people’s perceptions of others’ attractiveness. Additionally, the group photos may present a more natural photo context. When interacting with other people, any facial expressions or gestures may seem more natural and convincing. By contrast, individual portraits taken out of context might appear stilted, artificial, and, consequently, less pleasant.
To test these hypotheses, researchers compared attractiveness ratings of natural group photos with individual portrait photographs that had been taken separately but were grouped together for the experiment. They found that even when photos were presented in the form of such artificial group arrays, the Cheerleader Effect remained powerful: Participants continued to rate picture arrays as more attractive than individual photographs presented in isolation, thus suggesting that the social interaction and naturalistic appeal of real group photos were not decisive factors.
Searching for an alternative explanation of the Cheerleader Effect, researchers turned to the way people process visual information. We know from years of experimenting with optical illusions that context matters. Take a look at the image below, which displays two words consisting of three letters each. If you were asked to name the middle letter of each word, you’d likely respond with “H” for the first and “A” for the second. This is based on the context of the letters. “H” and “A” make intuitive sense, because they help to spell out the English words “the” and “cat” respectively. By contrast, if you were asked to focus on the middle letters in isolation, you’d undoubtedly notice that their shapes are identical, and cannot be identified as letters without ambiguity.
The perception of different letters based on the semantic context is a prime example of how the overall environment shapes our visual perception. It is also referred to as “top-down processing," meaning that our holistic perception of the image as a whole affects how we perceive its individual parts.
It is likely that just this type of context-dependent, top-down processing is responsible for the Cheerleader Effect. When a person is accompanied by other people, the observer tends to process the scene as a whole. They are likely to form an overall opinion of the group’s looks by averaging individual features across all members. Such an averaging process invariably helps to balance out small imperfections or extreme characteristics such as asymmetrical faces or above-average height. As a result, the group perception is typically more positive than any isolated assessments of its individual members.
Harness the power of the Cheerleader Effect
You can use this information to your advantage. Rather than trying another skin-cleansing regime or spending money on expensive new clothes, just try to surround yourself with other people. The next time you upload a photo to your social media profile, choosing a group picture could be more effective in boosting your reception than applying photo filters. And, of course, spending more time with friends could be a natural booster of self-esteem.
